It’s been a long time since the windscreen wipers on a new Mercedes-Benz were fabulously, expensively over-engineered things of wonder. Tellingly, those days have just returned.
This company, which used to throw more engineering resources into its cars than surely any other firm, has always had a fetish for complicated screen cleaning systems. With the glorious exception of Citroën, just about every manufacturer including Mercedes once stuck to the convention of mounting the wipers in a standard lay-out: one pivot by the base of the driver’s screen pillar, the other just behind the centreline of the bonnet/hood.
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Sadly, I’m slightly too young to remember the Pagoda roof SL when it was new but as a car-spotting kid I noticed its ‘hand clap’ layout. This was ditched in favour of a twin-blade system for the new SL in the early 1970s (both wiper mounts positioned in the middle of the panel below the windscreen). After that came the concealed spidery arms of the 1979 S-Class (better airflow and pedestrian safety, Mercedes reckoned) followed in 1986 by the reach-and-retract single wiper of the 200-500 series cars (the predecessors to today’s E-Class). Then it all went a bit boring, around the same time as the cost-cutters took control of the company.
Occasionally, there would be a new attempt at something clever for screen-cleaning (an unusual feature of the otherwise forgettable SEAT Altea is wipers that sit flush in the A-pillars) but for about a decade, there hasn’t been much to thrill weirdos like me who soak up every detail of new cars at motor shows.
Now, the happy moment for geeks the world over has returned. Not only is a new Benz SL mere days away from being revealed in the metal but there is a special mention of a ‘world debut’ wiper innovation in the advance media information. And as it’s a snazzy piece of engineering, I am going to forgive Mercedes-Benz the silly name: ‘Magic Vision Control’.
The clever bit of the new system is integrating wiper and washer into one component. The car’s occupants get their magic vision thanks to the washer fluid being squirted just in front of the wiper blade’s lip. The fluid is not only forced through channels that are built into the blade but this happens on both directions of wiping. In this way, no water is splashed onto the windscreen during spraying to disrupt the driver’s visibility. Possibly of more interest to the typical SL buyer is that roof down, her sunglasses will now be immune from the irritation of a light sprinkling with washer fluid.
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By GlobalDataMore? Agreed, not too much more. But let’s applaud the decision to offer a fully heated wiper blade for markets where snow is beautiful but dangerous too. This, another first, means not only the end of frozen-in-place wipers but allows warm water to be applied directly onto the windscreen for rapid de-icing.
By offering and making a point of publicising Magic Vision, Mercedes-Benz might well be back to its wonderful old ways, but windscreen wipers remain a curious throwback. Why has no production car been fitted with the compressed air systems we’ve seen on so many design studies?
After more than a hundred years, all cars still rely on bits of rubber dragged across glass to clear the view. Yet I suspect I know which company will be the one to introduce whatever contactless system eventually replaces them. And you know which part of the advance media information for next year’s new S-Class I’ll admit that I shall be reading first.
Author: Glenn Brooks
